Ah nearly identical post to before but see you did it at the command line hmm

Unfortunately, there is no 'recycle bin'

Unless you have backed up your VM uyou are out of luck.

vmdk files – These are the disk files that are created for each virtual hard drive in your VM. There are 3 different types of files that use the vmdk extension, they are:

o *–flat.vmdk file - This is the actual raw disk file that is created for each virtual hard drive. Almost all of a .vmdk file's content is the virtual machine's data, with a small portion allotted to virtual machine overhead. This file will be roughly the same size as your virtual hard drive.

o *.vmdk file – This isn't the file containing the raw data anymore. Instead it is the disk descriptor file which describes the size and geometry of the virtual disk file. This file is in text format and contains the name of the –flat.vmdk file for which it is associated with and also the hard drive adapter type, drive sectors, heads and cylinders, etc. One of these files will exist for each virtual hard drive that is assigned to your virtual machine. You can tell which –flat.vmdk file it is associated with by opening the file and looking at the Extent Description field.

o *–delta.vmdk file - This is the differential file created when you take a snapshot of a VM (also known as REDO log). When you snapshot a VM it stops writing to the base vmdk and starts writing changes to the snapshot delta file. The snapshot delta will initially be small and then start growing as changes are made to the base vmdk file, The delta file is a bitmap of the changes to the base vmdk thus is can never grow larger than the base vmdk. A delta file will be created for each snapshot that you create for a VM. These files are automatically deleted when the snapshot is deleted or reverted in snapshot manager.

You can recover from the second 2 being deleted, but the flat file means the data is gone.

A first post from a user answering a very old thread with a commercial link usually can be regarded as spam.

As the supply of useful tools for undelete on VMFS volumes is very very limited I decided to test this tool.

Here is a short summary:

GUI: - a bit strange - I thought it crashed directly at start because no new Windows appears in the taskbar of a Win 7 system. Workaround: after start of the tool open taskmanager - select the tool and use "switch to" option. Once you hit the "run trial" button it appears in the taskbar.

HELP: no online-help available - no buildin helpfunction

Handling of VMFS: the tool is not able or willing to display the content of a healthy VMFS-volume - it does not offer the VMFS volume for raw recovery either

Huch ? - whats that ?Next I searched the website for more information: terms like VMFS, vmdks or other expected keywords and found nothing.Final test: scan the binaries and dlls for strings to find out if there are any hidden VMFS-related functions that I may have missed.

Result: the program doesn't has the function to read VMFS

It also does not offer to attempt a raw recovery from unknown filesystems - (VMFS in this case)

Summary: this post asked for Undelete of vmdks from healthy VMFS-volumes

This tool is not useful for the task - a user that advertises it for exactly this task is expected to have tested this himself.This obviously did not happen - so I would recommend to regard the last post as spam.

If you need to Undelete from VMFS it would be a waste to spend any money on it.

I have been struggling with this for the last two months. Then, finally I got a simple and safe method of recovering data from deleted VMDK file using external software named – VMware data recovery tool. Apply this user-friendly application and achieve multiples task: repair file corruption of VMDK, restore entire components from deleted as well as formatted VMware Virtual machine partition. Download it free from here to examine it functionalities and working capability: http://www.vhdrecovery.com/vmware-recovery.html

There is no inbuilt tools to recover the deleted vmdk or flat files from the vmfs, you have to either restore from backup or contact Kroll Ontrack, seagate etc... data recovery companies. However, if its a san environment, and if you have lun level snapshots present, you can try and present a snapshot lun to one of the esxi host and mount it as a snap, and then recover the vms from there or svmotion it..